Study On Blanchot's Neutral Criticism

Maurice Blanchot is a writer and critic playing a pioneering role in France in the20 th century,but public criticism of his works and the restoration of “historical scenes” obviously lagged behind.However,the mismatch coincided with the upsurge and spread of French social movements and related theories,which produced positive impacts on the history of thoughts in the 20 th century: traditional metaphysics with metanarratives was questioned and examined by post-modernism.Post-Marxism and Deconstructionism,the mainstream of postmodernism,belong to negative criticism,but the two theories differ in the question of whether to establish constitution after criticism.Studies in recent years have revealed another possibility: the concept of“writing” in deconstructionism has dialogues with the concept of “practice” in Marxism,and their dialogues can continue to respond to the post-modern reality.Blanchot's “neutral” thoughts,which have profound impacts on the concept of“writing” in Deconstructionism,have actually foreshadowed the possibility of heterogeneous dialogues.The question regarding how Blanchot's neutral thoughts affected postmodernism by means of negative criticism can be divided into the following questions: when and how neutral thoughts shifted to become negative criticism and how “neutral criticism” influenced critical theory;how the characteristics of discontinuity,anonymity and multiplicity enabled the dialogues between “writing” and “practice”,literature and philosophy,and literature and politics;how and whether neutral criticism established a “literary community”;and whether the “literary community” is another form of constitution.Deliberation of the questions is conducive to the exploration of studies on Blanchot,and understanding of the interaction among postmodernism thoughts,and it enables us to delve into the possibility of further deepening the dialogues.In China,however,insufficient attention has been paid to research on Blanchot's thoughts in the regard.Taking “Blanchot's neutral criticism” as the subject,the thesis is aimed to restore the generation of “neutral criticism” in typical cultural,social and historical phenomena,and look into the above problems.The key to the generation of neutral criticism lies in the heterogeneous dialogues with others,which presents the“discontinuous” turn in the history of thoughts of the 20 th century,the ethical turn of respecting heterogeneity and the trend of returning back to daily life.The thesis combines Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life with the phenomenological reduction to reproduce the dialogues between Blanchot's neutral thoughts and typical French literature,cultural symbols,Roland Barthes,early German romanticism,and Alain Robbe-Grillet(representative writer of New Novel,or Le Nouveau Roman in French),to explain how neutrality gradually became a literary community through negative criticism and how it realized a new community and a new way of life.The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion,with five chapters in the main body.The introduction part,on the basis of clarifying the intention and significance of the topic,analyzes how Blanchot's neutral thoughts have dialogues with the Frankfurt School and Lefebvre's criticism of daily life,and creatively proposes the syllogism of the history of thoughts,three layers of openness and three kinds of relations in daily life,so as to construct neutral critical discourse.The introduction part conducts a literature review of studies at home and abroad,and detailed historical data are provided in the main body in view of the lack of practical studies on neutral criticism,thus comprehensively analyzing the ins and outs of neutral criticism.The first chapter focuses on the background of neutral criticism.The history of criticism from the 1940 s to the 1980 s was inseparable from Blanchot and Sartre because they made French discourse possible.The achievements of Blanchot,France,and the 20 th century were closely intertwined.Paris,the capital of France,the capital of literature,and the starting point and field of Blanchot's literary career,constituted a literary space to some extent: it was described by Blanchot,provided conditions for his neutral thoughts,and constituted acceptance for neutrality.This chapter examines why Blanchot criticized modernity featuring science and progress: Paris,which first enjoyed the fruits of science and progress,was bombarded by the autocratic language of stakeholders like the press,the bottom-up violence characterized by the barricade movement,and the rejection of others manifested by Antisemitism.In such a social context,Blanchot reflected on the Enlightenment which had enjoyed too much power since the French Revolution,and the rationality over-advocated by the ideas of Enlightenment.As the field of the most frequent and concentrated interaction between literature and revolutions,literature and politics,Paris,a modern city with modernity was then embodied,thus proving an abundant corpus and appropriate metaphors for neutral criticism.Subsequent chapters look into two concerns of neutral criticism: survival and aesthetics,that is,the ethics of how to coexist with others and how to express in a proper way.At the same time,the second chapter,the third chapter and the fourth chapter correspond to different stages of Blanchot's literary career,presenting the development of neutral criticism in chronological order.First of all,in the 1930 s when Blanchot started his career with political writing,he broke the shackles of intellectual nationalism with his neutral consciousness.Blanchot not only shattered the illusion of“peaceful Europe” during the two world wars,but also emphasized the necessity of neutrality by depicting the unrecognizable nationality traits of Parisians in the occupied area and general Parisians: self-knowledge was realized by criticism.However,his writing in this stage tends to be stimulated by cultural self-consciousness and thus it is his initial exploration to shift neutrality to negative criticism.The third chapter compares Blanchot with Barthes,the specific one of “the others”,in terms of their different attitudes,definitions and stances regarding neutrality.The chapter delves into the movements against de Gaulle authoritarianism and against the Algerian War,into May 68,and slogans and self-governing organizations in the May 68 movement,between the end of 1950 s and 1960 s,in order to analyze the different reactions and expressions of the two writers.The analysis is also aimed to highlight the daily life-based relevance and “practicality” of Blanchot's neutral criticism.It's because of the possibility of acting on spontaneous consciousness that neutral criticism was made practical.Declining passion for social movements in the 1960 s shifted the attention of French intellectuals including Blanchot to the reflections on language.They believed that the discussion of power shouldn't be limited to the perspective of state institutions and politics,but should also involve reflections on language.The fourth chapter starts with Blanchot's criticism of early German Romanticism.Blanchot criticized the possibility of “self-reflection” extremism,and proposed and practiced discontinuous writing characterized by discontinuous and multilingual language.However,because of discontinuous writing,neutral criticism evolved in a way different from philosophy and traditional literature: it acted on consciousness through writing rather than constitution,and it wasn't aimed to overturn a system but to constantly create literary communities.The creation of literary communities can be overly ideal,however,the impacts of neutral criticism on French Nouveau Roman,urban daily life writing in the 1980 s,and even literature and art in the 20 th century can still be felt today.Such differential interaction across time and space perhaps echoes the generativity of communities to some extent.Therefore,the last chapter takes Blanchot's representative novel L'arrêt de mort as an example,together with Le Voyeur,the representative work of Alain Robbe-Grillet,French Nouveau Roman pioneer,to analyze the rich legacy left to us by neutral criticism: how to mobilize the interaction between pictures and words to realize a new way of life based on daily life and related to literature and art.The conclusion part gives a brief summary of the main paths,key research points and core viewpoints of the study,and finally indicates that the practical value,spiritual connotation,forward-looking and unique thoughts of Blanchot's neutral criticism can be reasonably explained and fully revealed by examining the evolution of Blanchot's neutral criticism over a half century and the interaction between his thoughts and social,historical,and cultural factors.In this sense,the significance of this study lies not only in clarifying the definition,stage division,features,historical standing,and origin of Blanchot's neutral criticism,but also in taking it as a practical and feasible case to enable the exploration of paths of criticism in the new era.